You should leave the link in the article. Why would you want to screw the author anyway? Don't want to leave the link? Write your own articles.

An author can send you and your host a takedown notice too. Hosts never ignore legitimate takedown notices.

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As an author of hundreds of articles I go after content thieves with a vengance! Articles can be easily tracked and unless you are very good at blackhat you will eventually get caught. I caught one thief just today as a matter of fact. He will regret it.

Trust me, it's not worth leaving out the link back to the source. Writers of original content are extremely protective of our work.

Don't buy into any "tricks" because eventually someone smarter than you will catch you and rack up major legal fees for you to pay. The person who suggests the "trick" will not be paying the bill, you will.

ok this is the ultimate autoblog catch 22
so say you dont leave a link back ... the content author eventually sees his content being abused with no link back...and boom takes you down!
ok so ill add a link back problem solved...wrong...problem not solved...although your linking back your still stealing his content and he may not take kindly to it and take you down...but not only that but you have also led him directly to your site by publishing that link.
so you have a choice...try to stay under the radar and hope the author doesnt see or recognise his or her content...or leave a foot print saying here i am but hey im linking back to you so its ok right?
i personally link back and although occasionally some of the bigger blogs will come back to me and request i remove the content...i have never really had any problems

ok this is the ultimate autoblog catch 22
so say you dont leave a link back ... the content author eventually sees his content being abused with no link back...and boom takes you down!
ok so ill add a link back problem solved...wrong...problem not solved...although your linking back your still stealing his content and he may not take kindly to it and take you down...but not only that but you have also led him directly to your site by publishing that link.
so you have a choice...try to stay under the radar and hope the author doesnt see or recognise his or her content...or leave a foot print saying here i am but hey im linking back to you so its ok right?
i personally link back and although occasionally some of the bigger blogs will come back to me and request i remove the content...i have never really had any problems

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This is a good point-of-view to have but there is a best way and that is to simply contact the author for permission or read the blog TOS to see what's allowed.

There is another useage that makes it difficult for authors. I submit to major article directories and this allows anyone to reuse my content as long as my Author Box remains intact. The problem arises when scrapers pull the articles to an autoblog and deliberately edit the Author Box or make the linkback inoperable. Doing this is stealing, plain and simple.

I never object to anyone using my work as long as there is a linkback. It gives the user some good content and give me some juice.

Leaving the link in to the original source would be the ethical thing to do. I mean if you are using the guys content [or girl's] and making money from it, it's the least one could do. Also you are going to be getting so many posts in your blog that ranking will be much easier for your blog and the loss of PR juice should not be significant.

I guess what I am trying to say is if you leave the link in it's great for your reputation and you lose little by doing that

ok this is the ultimate autoblog catch 22
so say you dont leave a link back ... the content author eventually sees his content being abused with no link back...and boom takes you down!
ok so ill add a link back problem solved...wrong...problem not solved...although your linking back your still stealing his content and he may not take kindly to it and take you down...but not only that but you have also led him directly to your site by publishing that link.
so you have a choice...try to stay under the radar and hope the author doesnt see or recognise his or her content...or leave a foot print saying here i am but hey im linking back to you so its ok right?
i personally link back and although occasionally some of the bigger blogs will come back to me and request i remove the content...i have never really had any problems

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In autoblogs if we are using a decent rewriter then there should be no problem ?? You mentioned autoblogs and I am just starting with them.

As an author of hundreds of articles I go after content thieves with a vengance! Articles can be easily tracked and unless you are very good at blackhat you will eventually get caught. I caught one thief just today as a matter of fact. He will regret it.

Trust me, it's not worth leaving out the link back to the source. Writers of original content are extremely protective of our work.

I didn't ask you how did you find them, I asked you what do you do to site owners that have scraped your content

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Plagiarized material when widely circulated and where it contributes to profit for the thief is a felony under U.S. Copyright law which also has standing in International Courts. The country of origin provides no immunity from prosecution.

I first try contacting the site/blog owner and ask for a linkback to be added or the content removed. If that fails and, when I can track the ISP, my attorney writes a nice threatening letter to the thief's ISP to get them banned.

Now, you may say this is a waste of time and money. This is the usual reaction I get and it is correct when the instance only involves a single article. I don't waste much time or effort in such cases. Usually it only takes an email to the site owner to resolve these.

However, when there is wholesale theft of a major portion of my work, that's a different story. This has happened and was quickly resolved by the content being removed after I threatened the blog owner with legal steps.

Where the ISP is hidden (proxie), or I can't get the Whois identity, I report the thief to the Cyber Crimes Division of the U.S. Government. There is one case that will take several months to resolve as far as I am told but it is out of my hands now.

I don't mean to come off as a tough a--hole. I always give the benefit of the doubt before moving legally. After all, people do make mistakes especially when setting up autoblogs.

This brings us back to the original advice: Protect yourself by always including a backlink or Author Box when using work not created by you.

I personally use content on my Blogger blogs from lots of sources. All uses are with permission and all have backlinks to the original source. My Blogger blogs are not autoblogs (not yet) so all content is hand selected and posted by me to maintain quality content.

Sorry, but that concept goes against my entire universe. I don't want to bleed outbound links, I don't wanna give hits to the source, linking it back to my site as the referrer, etc. On one occasion I did set one up to say (via John Doe Blog) with no clickable link, but that was at the customer request. For mine, I'd never consider backlinking.

As far as plagiarism, a properly configured autoblog will not mirror your exact words and images will be stored locally and renamed automatically as well (if you echo that stuff), making the autoblog version having virtually nothing in common with the original, thus extremely hard to prove.

The other issue is, US criminal code on this only applies if the person is making a profit from your works, which is very hard to prove (I believe this to be true but am not an attorney).

If you write valuable materials, then put it behind a members only section or publish it via a non-public channel. A blog rss feed is like driving by a car wreck. It's out there for everyone to see whether you like it or not.

If you're the publisher, use image anti-leeching techniques, and consider having a bit of semi-randomised text only visible in your RSS feeds which basically says, if you're reading this from anywhere but site xyz, it's been stolen.

You can also spike your RSS with similar tagged content that is part of the feed but not displayed (think namespaces/xsl/xslt/css).

Maybe you'd rather just run your xhtml through an obfuscator, and then see how well the autoblog copes with that mess of characters.

There's a dozen of these kind of games that take a few minutes here and there, and make good sense. You take the time to lock your doors and not leave the car keys in the ignition... you can do the same with your website.

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